As an enlightened, modern
parent, I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage
them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or
alcohol is on the premises. I keep a
fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company they keep
and the books they read. You could say I'm a model parent. My children have never failed to
make me
proud, and I can say without the slightest
embellishment that I have the finest family in the USA.

Two years ago, my wife Carol and I decided that our children's education would not be
complete without some grounding in modern computers. To this end, we bought our children
a brand new Compaq to learn with. The kids had a lot
of fun using the handful of
application programs we'd bought, such as Adobe's
Photoshop and
Microsoft's
Word, and my wife and I were pleased that our gift was received so well. Our son Peter
was most entranced by the device, and became quite a pro at surfing the net. When Peter
began to spend whole days on the machine, I became concerned, but Carol advised me to
calm down, and that it was only a passing phase. I was content to bow to her experience as
a mother, until our youngest daughter, Cindy, charged into the living room one night to
blurt out:
"Peter is a computer hacker!"

Of course the World Trade Center bombings are a uniquely tragic event, and it is vital that
we never lose sight of the human tragedy involved. However, we must also consider if this
is not also a lesson to us all; a lesson that my political views are correct. Although
what is done can never be undone, the fact remains that if the world were organised
according to my political views, this tragedy would never have happened.

Goths are well known to be a troubled, sombre people.
They are common in our cities, schools and even universities, dressed in black, the colour
of evil, and forming strange cliques that no normal person can penetrate or even understand.
As the many incidents of school violence in America today have shown,
Goths can be very dangerous, because they worship a certain type of evil and have no
respect for the rule of law.

As I was driving home this evening I saw my first Christmas light display of the season,
located in a suburban strip mall. Nothing excites me more than seeing shopkeepers really
getting into the holiday spirit by hanging lights only a couple weeks after Halloween,
and during this otherwise troubling time we really need to have our thoughts turned
towards happier things.

One of my fondest memories of Christmases past, and a tradition I intend to uphold, is
curling up in front of the Yule log with a good book. This year we have two new holiday-themed
novels to help us while away those blustery winter evenings in pure escapist bliss.

The idea of intelligent civilizations beyond the planet Earth has always captivated Mankind.
It has been romanticized by science fiction authors, journalists, philosophers, and even
spiritual leaders. But even the most enthusiastic believers
in extraterrestrial life claim that it's unlikely that we will ever know "for sure" if intelligent
life exists in the Cosmos, at least in our lifetimes.

Or is it?

I believe that intelligent civilizations do exist elsewhere in the Universe; futhermore,
I believe that their existence can be proven. And to prove it, we need to do nothing more than
turn to Scripture.

It is a certainty today that any journalist, co-worker or friend who uses the word
"hacker" to describe
a computer criminal will be ritualisticly hectored by dogmatic computer enthusiasts with
tedious stories of the allegedly benign origins of the word "hacker."
Sometimes these origins are ascribed to the MIT railroad club of the 1950s, and sometimes they
are placed earlier, in the engineering side of the American industrial home front of World War II.
Regardless of historical location, the mythology so presented is consistent in its insistence that
the word was wholly positive in every aspect, devoid of any negative connotation whatsoever.
By the early 1980s, however, the word was being used by computer enthusiasts to describe
the criminal element in their midst, a usage that the press picked up as computers spread into
the home and the public consciousness. How did this apparent change come about? The answer, I
believe, lies in the game of golf.

Programming computers is, for practically everyone, something done far
away in exotic software engineering facilities by a priesthood of ultra-specialized,
half-mad obsessive-compulsives. This is as it should be, and it is where
we get the software we use every day to do our online banking, send email,
and get productive work done. Though few normal people have any experience
of it, or know anyone who does it, there is another kind of programming
performed outside this legitimate sphere, one that you probably assumed
was illegal, but shockingly, is not.

Once upon a time two great alliances of nations fought a long and bitter war in a clash of good against evil. Eventually the forces of light won, and all that remained was one small nation led by evil rulers that would not surrender, no matter what the cost to their nation.

In their wisdom, the greatest nation in the forces of light decided that it would be wrong to drag the battle out longer than was necessary and decimate those whose only fault was to have been duped by evil men, and so they got their mightiest wizards to rain fire upon their two of their enemy's cities, and the enemy leaders realised their folly and capitulated at once.

Knowing that prosperity encourages peace, the wise men of the great nation went into the conquered nation and helped rebuild it, letting the people rule themselves and build a future for their nation. In time, they began to prosper thanks to hard work and ingenuity, and eventually they became a mighty trading nation, far surpassing any level of wealth they might have otherwise expected.

Unfortunately the clash of old and new cultures gave rise to value system that neither culture would have been happy with. Indeed, some of these new fetishes were so virulently immoral they could be described as a plague. And like any plague, they could spread far beyond where they were spawned, infecting entirely new cultures unused and unprotected from their effects.

This is a story about one such plague, and how it has reached our shores.

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